“I seem to be in a medieval musical mode,” it hazily dawns on Michael Urie as he starts evolving these days from Sir Robin of Spamalot at the St. James into Prince Dauntless the Drab of Once Upon a Mattress, the new Encores! entry at the New York City Center, running until February 4.

As late as last week, he was drawing double duty with both—rehearsing Dauntless by day and playing Sir Robin by night. “I don’t want to leave at all,” he says—but these shows must go on.

Urie—perhaps best know for his TV roles on Ugly Betty, Younger, and Shrinking—signed up for the Spamalot revival, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, when it played the Kennedy Center last May and left that to try out a stage version of Dan Brown’s bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. It needed more work, so it was back to Spamalot on Broadway.

In Spamalot—a.k.a. Monty Python’s Spamalot, A Musical (Lovingly) Ripped Off from the 1975 Motion Picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail—a former Aladdin, James Monroe Iglehart, plays King Arthur, rounding up worthies to be knights for his Round Table. Sir Robin, a certified scaredy-cat and collector of plague corpses (not all are dead yet), somehow qualifies. “That’s my day job,” Urie quips. “I really want to sing and dance.”

He gets his wish in spades. “I did not train to dance, I did not train to sing, and here I am in the middle of this huge production number that’s really three numbers in one, ‘We Won’t Succeed on Broadway (If We Don’t Have Any Jews).’ Josh, our director, has created something huge and spectacular, beautiful, and........

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